George Soros

Founder and chair of Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Foundations. Born in Budapest in 1930, he survived the Nazi occupation during World War II and fled communist-dominated Hungary in 1947 for England, where he graduated from the London School of Economics. He then settled in the United States, where he accumulated a large fortune through the international investment fund he founded and managed.

Soros has been active as a philanthropist since 1979, when he began providing funds to help black students attend Cape Town University in apartheid South Africa. He has since given away more than $32 billion. The Open Society Foundations today support individuals and organizations in more than 120 countries, working to build vibrant and inclusive democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens.

Soros writes regularly on politics, society, and economics, and has authored over a dozen books, including In Defense of Open Society (2019).